Wai Keung Lai and Siu Fai Mak’s Infernal Affairs was a tight as a snare drum cat-and-mouse thriller that justly invited comparisons with Michael Mann’s Heat. As with Mann at his best, it dealt with themes of identity, moral compromise and the betrayal of the self. Stylistically, though, it owed a huge debt of honour to Martin Scorsese.
Now Scorsese has remade it, transposing the Hong Kong setting to Brooklyn. The maestro, back on the mean streets, helming his first gangster flick since Casino. A weighty dramatic role for his new favourite leading man, Leonardo di Caprio. A flashy demonic role for Jack Nicholson. The cast rounded out by Matt Damon, Alec Baldwin, Ray Winstone, Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg. To say MovieBuff was excited about The Departed is putting it mildly. Taking my seat in Screen 10 of Nottingham’s UGC this afternoon, I was almost wetting myself in anticipation.
Fast forward two and a half hours, and a very unhappy little MovieBuff trudged back to his car. Chalk it up as yet another disappointment in the year of half-arsed cinema that is 2006*.
So what went wrong? For starters, here’s a quick point of comparison. Infernal Affairs and The Departed follow exactly the same narrative arc – cop goes undercover to get close to crime lord; crime lord despatches one of his men to join the police force; the two moles try to smoke each other out – but where Infernal Affairs is a taut one hour forty minutes, Departed clocks in at two and a half hours. And there’s not even much in the way of additional material, just a cack-handed romantic subplot which sees the dual protagonists get involved with the same woman. The contrivances required to effect this triangle bypass any logicality in character motivation. Newcomer Vera Farmiga struggles with a nothing role as a police psychologist. There is no chemistry between any of the leads. Strike one!
Script-wise, writer William Monahan dilutes the moral quandaries of his source material, drowning anything remotely dramatic under tons of verbiage. Cliches pile up. The dialogue – a litany of racist, sexist and homophobic epithets – becomes numbingly repetitive. For every half-way decent scene – di Caprio’s induction into Nicholson’s mob; a gunfight at an industrial works, huge earth-moving machines towering over the combatants like sepulchres – there are five other scenes that go nowhere, contribute nothing and leave you looking at your watch. Strike two!
Performance-wise, Nicholson (while at least having fun with the character) slips too often into pantomime villainy; Damon is simply bland; Sheen is dependable rather than inspired; and Winstone and Baldwin turn in their usual patented performances – shouty hardnut and shouty prissy narcissist respectively. Strike three!
For the defence: di Caprio gives a convincing turn, and Wahlberg – as a foul-mouthed, impatient, unorthodox (but ultimately honourable) cop – emerges with arguably the only bit of glory that this – sorry to say, because, at his best, Scorsese is worthy of the title ‘greatest living American director’ – lumbering, bloated, by-the-numbers bit of film-making has to offer.
*Okay, I’m being unfair to at least half a dozen shit-hot movies, but really … when Michael Mann, Martin Scorsese and the Pirates of the Caribbean remake all conspire to promise plenty and deliver dick – within just a couple of months – it makes you feel like pulling the plug on the high profile releases and embarking on an odyssey for the obscure.
Rookie cop Bucky Bleichert (Josh Harnett) meets cop-on-the-make Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) during the zoot suit riots in post-war LA. Both are amateur pugilists. Coerced by the department into a publicity stunt 10-round bout, on the back of which the incumbent DA furthers his political career, Bleichert’s reward for throwing the fight is progression to detective and the dubious honour of partnering the increasingly unorthodox Blanchard. When aspiring actress and all-round party girl Elizabeth Short (Mia Kirschner) is brutally murdered, her body eviscerated, Blanchard, angling for even more glory, gets them seconded to the case. While Blanchard becomes inextricably obsessed with the murder victim, Bleichert finds himself torn between his attraction to his partner’s peroxide blonde girlfriend Kay (Scarlett Johannson) and society girl with a penchant for sleazy liaisons Madeleine (Hilary Swank), whose connection to the luckless Elizabeth spells bad news for Bucky.
Brian de Palma’s adaptation of James Ellroy’s breakthrough novel benefits from a script by Josh Friedman which teases out the narrative complexities and remains reasonably faithful (even though the mechanics of the denouement, punchy and psychologically chilling in the novel, are rendered as overwrought melodrama here).
But narrative complexity is only part of Ellroy’s genius as a writer. His novels are shot through with an equally complex, and even darker, sense of psychological understanding. He burrows into the most twisted recesses of the human psyche and doesn’t flinch from what he finds. Steve Grant in Time Out calls him “a Tinseltown Dostoyevsky” – the most perceptive critical comment on Ellroy I’ve ever come across.
This is where de Palma’s film fails. It doesn’t engage with Blanchard’s psycho-sexual obsessions, nor with Bleichert’s moral disintegration (throwing the fight is his first betrayal of the self, and from then on it’s downhill all the way). Partly, this is because de Palma isn’t an actor’s director. Eckhart, so good in almost everything else he’s been in, is reduced to a pantomime performance; Harnett, who has built a career on blandness, is just plain miscast; and Johannson pouts her way through a nothing role. Elsewhere, Fiona Shaw (as Madeleine’s dipso mother) seems to have walked in from another production altogether – one where Tennessee Williams meets Ingmar Bergman by way of David Lynch.
Only Kirschner and Swank – both transcending the limitations of their director – emerge with any credibility. Lensed by legendary cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, and boasting Dante Ferretti’s highly detailed production design, the film looks gorgeous, but style alone just isn’t enough. De Palma, who hasn’t made a good movie since 1993’s Carlito’s Way, sacrifices depth and substance, and shoots his movie in the foot as a result. His obsession with Hitchcock homages and flashy directorial interventions are totally at odds with the aesthetic of Ellroy. It was rumoured, a couple of years ago, that David Fincher would helm The Black Dahlia. If only that had been the case.
Meet the Hoover family: patriarch Richard (Greg Kinnear) is a motivational speaker who insists that everyone has a choice between being a winner and a loser, even though his personal success rate relegates him to the latter category; his wife Sheryl (Toni Colette) juggles a day job, motherhood and the running of a chaotic household; their children number Dwayne (Paul Dano), a goth who wears a ‘Jesus was wrong’ tee-shirt and refuses to speak, and Olive (Abigail Breslin) a precocious pre-teen who dreams of being a beauty queen. Unexpected guests in the Hoover household are Richard’s father Edwin (Alan Arkin), newly expelled from his retirement home for drugs related offences, and Edwin’s brother Frank (Steve Carell), a brilliant but neurotic scholar recuperating from a suicide attempt.
It doesn’t sound like the makings of a feelgood comedy, but trust me, Little Miss Sunshine – directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris from a literate and witty script by Michael Arndt – is this year’s Sideways. Like Alexander Payne’s masterpiece, it unfolds as an off-beat road movie, and finds humour in melancholy.
The road movie element sees the dysfunctional sextet crowded into a beat-up old VW Microbus as they head for California where Olive is to compete in the final of the Little Miss Sunshine contest. Everything from mechanical failure to hospitalisation conspires to prevent them, and when they finally make it to the pastel-decorated hotel hosting the event, Richard, Dwayne and Frank – at odds from the outset – find themselves united in abhorrence: the beauty contest verges on exploitation, prepubescent girls made up and paraded more in the manner women ten or fifteen years their senior. Olive, however, insists in competing.
The sense of melancholy owes to the film’s principle thematic concern: it’s about the failure of its characters’ ambitions. By the end, it’s all down to Olive to win one back even though everything seems stacked against her. The ending doesn’t pan out quite as you’d expect … but it’s all absolute delight all the same, gloriously sending up the beauty pageant for what it is.
Ten year old Abigail Breslin (who made her debut as Mel Gibson’s daughter in Signs) turns in an astounding performance, but so does the whole cast; in particular, Toni Colette, striking the right note between flustered and dependable as a woman trying to be all things to all family members, and Alan Arkin, an absolute hoot as the foul-mouthed, sex-obsessed Edwin (“Are you getting any?” he asks Dwayne at one point. “What are you, fifteen? Just the right age. You’re jailbait and they’re jailbait. It doesn’t matter. Leave it till you’re eighteen and you’re looking at three to five”.)
Bear in mind that it’s Edwin who coaches Olive for the dance number she performs at the contest and you might get some idea of how unorthodox her routine is.
Intelligently directed, sensitively acted, alternating with a lightness of touch between hilarious and poignant, Little Miss Sunshine is one of the best films of the year.
As you may have guessed from the tone of the last review, An Inconvenient Truth has had a powerful effect on the way I think about environmental issues. I used to be a sceptic. At best, my head was buried in the sand. At worst, I sneered at tree-huggers and goody-two-shoe nature boys. Just serve me my words with a side salad and a big dollop of mayo and I’ll start tucking in right now.
This is the deal, in a nutshell: I used to be part of the problem. Now I want to be part of the solution. To this end, I have set up a new weblog – www.convenientsolution.blog-city.com – but I don’t want it to be another MovieBuff, ie. me pontificating all the time.
I’d like it to be a forum. A place where I can pass on information. A place where I can learn from others. A place for discussion, encouragement and positive action. Please visit the site. Please leave a comment. If you feel passionately about an issue, if I’ve missed something out, if I’m just plain wrong about something and you need to provide a corrective … then do so!
I’m looking for articles, ideas, opinions, comments, suggestions. I’m just one guy and I’m still in the dark about a lot of things (a throwback to my head-in-the-sand years), but I’d like to think I can do my part. That I can help make a difference. Now I need people to help me.
On paper, it doesn’t sound like much of an evening at the flicks: 97 minutes of a US politician giving a PowerPoint presentation about global warming, with a few bits of newsreel footage spliced in. But don’t be put off. An Inconvenient Truth is a gripping and thought-provoking documentary about Al Gore’s campaign – although a better word would be crusade; the man is passionate and dedicated – to promote understanding of the global climate crisis. Tirelessly travelling from city to city, state to state, his goal is to raise public awareness, eradicate the myths surrounding global warming that have been propagated in the popular press, and – crucially – to encourage his audience that the solution can be social, not political. Gore’s lack of faith in the Bush administration isn’t just sour grapes at his defeat in Florida, but based on hard-won personal experience of the political process. America has still not ratified the Kyoto Treaty – the only major country (apart from Australia) not to do so. Oil and big business hold sway over policy-making. Gore relates the story of Phillip Cooney, a lobbyist for American Petroleum who was appointed as Bush’s environmental advisor … a conflict of interests by any standards! Cooney’s White House career came to an end after a whistleblower leaked documents that proved he had censored reports warning of the growing climate crisis. The day after Cooney resigned, he went to work for Exxon Mobil. But of course, the basic facts of global warming are the very things big business doesn’t want to face up to (the ‘inconvenient truth’ of the title): energy consumption and fossil fuels contribute to the huge quantities of CO2 in the atmosphere. Gore charts a direct correlation between CO2 levels and temperature increase. Melting icecaps and glaciers are only part of the problem; extreme weather conditions such as hurricanes and typhoons have also increased dramatically in the last decade, culminating in last year’s Hurricane Katrina. The evidence is incontrovertible: a simple graph shows how drastically levels have risen since the 1970s. A projection, based on current increase, demonstrates that within 45 years, the effect on Earth’s atmosphere will be one of irreversible ecological damage. Gore’s message is clear: we have a decade in which we can do something; counter the problem; pulls ourselves back from the brink. It sounds bleak, but Gore remains confident that changes can be made. This is what it will take: as many people as possible taking personal responsibility in a matter of global morality. Will it happen? I can only offer my response to the film: An Inconvenient Truth has changed the way I think about certain issues. It has corrected my misunderstanding, based on erroneous and scaremongering reports in the media, of the causes and results of global warming. It has shown me that, on a personal basis, I can make a change. We all can. Go and see the film, buy the book that accompanies it – and you’ll already have made a start.
To the UGC last night for the excellent Little Miss Sunshine; back there again this afternoon for An Inconvenient Truth and Children of Men. Next week there’s The Black Dahlia, Clerks II and Trust the Man to fit in. I’m still undecided about The Queen, but I’ve had several people ask my opinion on it … watch this space.
Ultimately, these are all films which will demand a single entry review. Let me take this opportunity, then, while the chicken cooks and the potatoes boil, to present a Sunday lunchtime round-up and clear the decks for the aforementioned forthcoming filmic fayre.
Cars. Unfairly drubbed by critics for the less-than-heinous crime of being not as good as The Incredibles, it has to be remembered that Cars is a different film. Where The Incredibles was tightly-plotted, imaginatively inventive and jam-packed with clever satire, Cars is a more (pardon the pun) character-driven piece. It’s essentially the tale of a race car who learns to slow down. Sure, the pace is leisurely but that’s part of the charm. Sure, there’s not much of a narrative arc, but the story is about self-discovery not the Bond-like set-pieces of The Incredibles. Ultimately, Cars is a brilliant piece of animation (it raises the bar, even by Pixar’s own standards), funny in some places, poignant in others, and sure to send you out of the cinema with a smile on your face … after, that is, you’ve sat through the end credits: in-jokes aplenty lurk therein.
Over the Hedge. Again, sniffy treatment from the critics, this time for not being a Pixar production. SFW? Okay, the level of animation is good rather than great, but there’s an impressive vocal cast headed by Bruce Willis and featuring Garry Shandling, Steve Carell, William Shatner and Canadian songstress Avril Lavigne, the story ticks along nicely, there’s at least two set-pieces (one involving a racoon high on caffeine) that’ll have you howling, and a decent quota of belly laughs scattered throughout the rest of the film.
The King. Gael Garcia Bernal turns in a likeable performance in James Marsh’s downbeat character study, ‘likeable’ being the key to why the film works. Bernal’s character, Elvis (hence the title) Valderez, gets out of the Navy, goes looking for his estranged father, a fire and brimstone preacher (William Hurt) and casually insinuates himself in Hurt’s new family. Valderez is a young man seeking acceptance; wanting love. When these ideals are threatened, he reacts violently. But there’s nothing angry or vicious about Bernal’s characterisation; he’s completely affable throughout. Marsh handles the dichotomy nicely, mostly leaving the darker moments to the audience’s imagination. The degree of complicity that Hurt’s family demonstrate renders certain stretches of the film unrealistic but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing; the religious undertones are such that the film comes across as a modern parable, a cynical take on the prodigal son – and how many of the parables can you describe as realistic?
Harsh Times. Another downbeat drama, this time with urban alienation writ large. Former Marine Jim David (Christian Bale) divides his time between drinking and getting high with his buddy Mike Alvarez (Freddy Rodriguez) in South Central LA, and courting a good natured girl from a peasant family across the border in Mexico. Flirting around the edges of the criminal underworld, David’s attempts to stay clean while he undergoes evaluation for a possible job in law enforcement go badly off the rails. Writer/director David Ayer tackles thorny material (the thin line between the establishment and the criminal mindset; the psychological effects of combat; the fragility of racial and/or national identity) with a refreshing lack of bombast or judgementalism. He simply invites you to spend a couple of hours with his characters and draw your own conclusions. His direction has an edgy intensity, and he draws from Bale – a shit-hot actor whatever he’s in – a career-best performance.
Volver. Used to be a new Pedro Almodovar film was an event to shout to the heavens about. His last few have left me feeling a little deflated; the exuberance of his earlier work seems to have ebbed. Good to see him back on, if not top form, then decent form with this cocktail of family secrets, self-rediscovery and murder-most-justified. While never being as camp or kitsch as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown or Kika, Volver is at least a lot more colourful than Talk to Her or Bad Education. It also reconfirms Almodovar’s strength as a director of women: Penelope Cruz is terrific, a lot better than in any of her Hollywood outings, and there’s excellent support from Carmen Maura, Lola Duenos and Blanca Portillo.
The Lake House. Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock re-unite in their first film together since Speed – the crowd-pleaser that set both of them up for stardom – only this film is very different. A mellow romantic fable overlaid with hints of the supernatural, the very concept of The Lake House could have been its undoing from the start. Reeves, an idealistic architect trying to emerge from the shadow of his infinitely more famous father (Christopher Plummer, lending gravitas), lets out the titular property (designed by his old man) to Bullock’s overworked doctor who has just emerged from a stifling relationship. Two years separate their respect residencies at the house, yet they begin a correspondence that crosses the boundaries of time. I hardly need tell you that they fall in love. So far, so much high concept tosh, right? Well, to a degree: there are a few mawkish moments and various contrivances are employed to keep the two timelines overlapping. But somehow, director Alejandro Agresti makes it work. The performances are good: Bullock’s careworn medic is an effective piece of characterisation, and Reeves’s scenes with Plummer are quietly gripping. The cinematography, all autumnal hues, conjures moments of visual poetry while keeping the film grounded in as much reality as a story of this ilk can hope for. The ending does veer towards melodrama, and the resolution calls for a blatant cheat, but The Lake House retains an easy-going charm; even if it’s not a great film, it’s certainly likeable.
A Scanner Darkly. A more typical Reeves role, even if the film itself is decidedly left of centre. The druggy milieu of Philip K Dick’s tale of addiction and paranoia comes across, with Reeves at its protagonist, as Bill & Ted meet Franz Kafka. That might sound like snide, rent-a-quote reviewing, but adaptations of Dick’s strange fictive universe benefit from the bizarre. Taking a ‘normal’ (ie. mainstream) approach – Total Recall, for example, or Paycheque – fails. The dark poetry of Blade Runner, however, remains the best example of Dick on film, even though it makes huge departures from its source novel. Writer/director Richard Linklater forges his own path: A Scanner Darkly was shot as live action, then animated. The result is like watching a graphic novel come to life (Christian Volckman’s Renaissance, just released on the arthouse circuit, takes a similar approach – review shortly). The technique is occasionally awkward, and the sharp-eyed viewer will see the joins, but with the cast – which also features Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey Jnr and (in her comeback role) Winona Ryder – firing on all cylinders, this is still a damn good film. The ending, too, is memorable, managing to be fittingly downbeat and yet curiously poetic.